Police have determined that the suspicious off-white
substance delivered to five hotels near MetLife Stadium this morning was
actually cornstarch according to preliminary tests.

TARIQ ZEHAWI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Bergen County Hazmat along with police and fire
departments are at the Homewood Suites Hilton in East Rutherford Route
17 southbound on a hazardous material call.

The
substances were delivered this morning and reported to county officials
at 11:42 a.m., said Jeanne Barratta, chief of staff to Bergen County Executive Kathleen Donovan.
She said the substance was delivered to two hotels in Carlstadt and one in East Rutherford.
She said she did not know if anyone at the hotel was exposed to the
substance. The FBI and New Jersey State Police are also working the
case, she said.

- See more at:
http://www.northjersey.com/carlstadt/Police_converge_on_Carlstadt_hotel_on_hazardous_material_call.html#sthash.I6iGByMC.dpuf

Police have determined that the suspicious off-white
substance delivered to five hotels near MetLife Stadium this morning was
actually cornstarch according to preliminary tests.

TARIQ ZEHAWI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Bergen County Hazmat along with police and fire
departments are at the Homewood Suites Hilton in East Rutherford Route
17 southbound on a hazardous material call.

The
substances were delivered this morning and reported to county officials
at 11:42 a.m., said Jeanne Barratta, chief of staff to Bergen County Executive Kathleen Donovan.
She said the substance was delivered to two hotels in Carlstadt and one in East Rutherford.
She said she did not know if anyone at the hotel was exposed to the
substance. The FBI and New Jersey State Police are also working the
case, she said.

- See more at:
http://www.northjersey.com/carlstadt/Police_converge_on_Carlstadt_hotel_on_hazardous_material_call.html#sthash.I6iGByMC.dpuf

Updated: 13:55 EST

A White Powdery suspicious powder has been sent to 3 New Jersey Hotels (6 Envelopes) near site of upcoming Super Bowl. A seventh letter was intercepted at the office of former Mayor Rudy #Giuliani.

The letter, opened in the mail room, contained white powder, according to law enforcement officials.

In New Jersey, the site
of Sunday's Super Bowl, an unidentified substance was delivered to two
hotels in Carlstadt and one in East Rutherford, said Jeanne Baratta,
chief of staff at the Bergen County Executive's Office.

Law enforcement officials told CNN that six letters were discovered in New Jersey.

The FBI and local
officials were monitoring the situation. Law enforcement officials said
the incidents were considered a routine investigation, not a threat.

The New Jersey State Police released the following statement.
The Joint Terrorism Task Force and Hazard Materials units have
responded to several locations that have received a suspicious letter
and substance. There are no reported injuries at this time, and the
locations are being secured. This situation is being thoroughly
investigated and more information will be provided when it becomes
available.

"Cars abandoned at odd angles on side streets,
thoroughfares and major interstates. People in this car-dependent city
walked for miles, hunched over and huddled from the cold. Many had no
coats, hats or gloves.

"It was a like a scene from The Walking Dead," said Maura Neill, 38, referring to the television series about a post-apocalyptic world overtaken by zombies.

"The mistake here is that no one expected the snow to hit as quickly," said Neill, who was stranded in gridlock for 10 hours.

Neill's story is typical of the chaos that gripped the region."

"This just threw everybody off, we weren't prepared for it."

UPDATE 29.01.2014:

IT DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN.

Atlanta (CNN) -- [Breaking news update at 12:32 p.m. Wednesday]Five
people have died, and 23 people have been injured because of Tuesday's
wintry weather in Alabama, the state Emergency Management Agency said
Wednesday.

[Breaking news update at 12:28 p.m. Wednesday]Asked if
officials should have closed roads and urged people to stay home before
Tuesday's snowfall, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal said Wednesday: "If we
close the city of Atlanta and our Interstate system based on maybes,
then we would not be a very productive (state or city)." He said that
some forecasts called for just a dusting of snow. "It's easy to make
judgment calls after the fact, but I daresay there's not anybody in this
room that could have (predicted the degree) of the problem that
developed."

[Breaking news update at 12:06 p.m. Wednesday]Georgia
Gov. Nathan Deal on Wednesday said state government will close again on
Thursday because of treacherous road conditions. He asked people to
stay off the roads to give crews time to clear them.

[Breaking news update at noon Wednesday]Georgia
Gov. Nathan Deal said officials plan to have all children who stayed in
their schools overnight because of treacherous post-snow road
conditions "transported as soon as possible back to their homes." Among
those still in their schools Wednesday morning, Deal said: About 2,000
in the Fulton County school system and about 400 the in the Atlanta
Public Schools. National Guard troops and state police will escort buses
as they drop kids home, he said.http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/29/us/winter-weather/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

On Wed of this week, AlertsUSA subscribers were notified via text messages to their mobile devices that the CDC had issued an advisory
to medical clinicians nationwide warning that consideration should be
given to the possibility of an H5N1 bird flu infection in persons
meeting the following criteria:

New-onset severe acute respiratory illness requiring hospitalization…

and

Recently travel abroad to countries where human cases of H5N1 bird flu
have been detected, or where the virus is known to be circulating in animals.

There are a number of reasons, one of which is that according to the World Health Organization, at least 60% of cases classified as H5N1 result in death, and a particularly gruesome one at that. According to the CDC,
most reports of H5N1 in humans have described severe illness, including
pneumonia leading to respiratory failure, encephalitis, septic shock,
internal bleeding, brain inflammation, multi-organ failure and more.

Tokyo Electric Power Company has reached a minor milestone in cleaning up the mess that started at its Fukushima nuclear power station
on Friday, March 11, 2011 (March 12, U.S.). A subsea earthquake off the
Pacific coast of Tōhoku, the resulting tsunami, and an unfortunate
series of human miscalculations have dogged the ruined facility for almost three years.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant
originally comprised six boiling water reactors of a half-century-old
General Electric design. The installation was one of the world’s 25
largest nuclear power stations. TEPCO currently believes that after the
tsunami, units 1-3 suffered meltdowns, perhaps even through the floors
of the buildings and into the soil.

However, the situation in unit
4 merited the most immediate attention. There, the building had partly
collapsed. New and spent (used) fuel rods stored in temporary
containment 100 feet above ground level were emitting radiation to the
atmosphere.

In danger of internal
collision due to seismic events or spillage from the damaged secondary
containment, this exposed fuel has threatened Japan with a massive
uncontrollable nuclear chain reaction. After completing precautionary
activities, on November 18, 2013, the company began a delicate task of
rearrangement. Plant workers started moving the assemblies of nuclear
fuel rods racked in the upper-story pool to safer ground-level storage
in a centralized pool common to all the damaged reactors.

As well as the hazard of
spontaneous explosions, spent fuel rods can release considerable heat
and quickly lethal levels of radiation. Robot cranes and other
human-directed machinery are necessary to move these very hazardous
materials. The unit 4 cooling pond contains 1,533 fuel assemblies, of
which 1,331 have been used and 202 are unirradiated (fresh) ones. Some
of the fuel assemblies are known to be damaged.

Today,
TEPCO plant personnel completed 10% of the transfers that must be done
to stabilize the fuel from reactor unit 4. TEPCO describes the operations being undertaken as follows:

Relocate the fuel assemblies stored in the fuel rack inside the
spent fuel pool, one by one, into a transportation container (cask)
underwater using a fuel handling machine.

Lift up the cask from the spent fuel pool using a crane.

Conduct, on the floor as high as the operating floor, such works as closing the lid of the cask and decontaminating the cask.

Lift down the cask toward the ground using the crane to lay it on a trailer.

Transport the cask to the common pool using the trailer.

TEPCO expects it will take
about a year to make all the Unit 4 transfers. Hundred-ton casks of fuel
have now been transported to ground-level storage seven times, for a
total of 154 transferred

Tokyo Shimbun, December 31, 2013, with translation by Fukushima Voice (version 2e), published Jan. 6, 2014: It was discovered that the memorandum of cooperation between the IAEA and Fukushima as well as Fukui Prefectures contain a confidentiality clause [...] critics say “it could be preempting the State Secrecy Protection Law.” [...] In Fukushima Prefecture, it was the prefectural government that entered into an agreement with IAEA in the area of decontamination and radioactive waste management, whereas Fukushima Medical University entered into an agreement with IAEA in the area of the survey of radiological effect on human health. [...] “The Parties will ensure the confidentiality of information classified by the other Party as restricted or confidential.” [...] if either the prefectures or IAEA decide to classify information for “they contribute to worsening of the residents’ anxiety,” there is a possibility that such information as the accident information, as well as radiation measurement data and thyroid cancer information may not be publicized. [...] IAEA has published reports, after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, stating “there were no health effects due to radiation exposure.” [...]

Japan’s Nihon TV in 1993: ‘What Happened to Chernobyl Children 7 Years after the Accident’ (Source: tokyobrowntabby2)

Practical Arrangements between Fukushima Medical University and the International Atomic Energy Agency on Cooperation in the Area of Human Health (pdf), Dec. 15, 2012: The Parties have identified the following areas and activities in which cooperation may be pursued: [...] IAEA will assist the University in implementing the Fukushima Health Management Survey project; [...] the Parties will collaborate in capacity building and research on human health programmes, including radiation emergency medicine; [...] the IAEA will endeavour to organize conferences, seminars and workshops, in cooperation with the University, with the aim of enhancing public awareness of radiological effects on human health and addressing the issue of “radiation fear” and post-traumatic stress disorders in the Fukushima population; [...] The Parties will support the widest possible dissemination of unclassified information [...] The Parties will ensure the confidentiality of information classified by the other Party as restricted or confidential. [...]Ruiko Mutoh, representative of Fukushima nuclear disaster plaintiffs: “IAEA has a history of hiding information about health effects in Chernobyl. The same thing could happen to Fukushima.”

A major solar flare measuring X1.2 was detected on Tuesday afternoon peaking at 18:30 UTC . The source of the eruption was region 1943, with interaction between sunspot 1944. Because the flare appears to be long in duration, a coronal mass ejection is possible. The blast site is in a great geoeffective position for Earth directed eruptions. Attached image by the Solar Dyanamics Observatory (SDO) via solarham.net

X-FLARE:
Giant sunspot AR1944 erupted on Jan 7th
at approximately 1832 UT, producing a
powerful X1-class
solar flare. First-look coronagraph
images from the STEREO-Ahead spacecraft
appear to show a coronal mass ejection
(CME) emerging from the blast site. If
so, the CME is almost certainly heading for Earth.
Stay tuned for updates as more data arrive from
the NASA-ESA Heliophysics Fleet.

HUGE SUNSPOT TARGETS EARTH: One of the biggest sunspots in years is crossing the center of the solar disk, putting Earth in the

The CDC considered flu to be "widespread" in a state when more than 50 percent of its geographic area is reporting flu activity. The widespread classification does not relate to the severity of the flu strain.

(Reuters) - Nearly half of the United States is reporting widespread influenza activity, most of it attributed to the H1N1 virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 2009, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.Thousands of people die every year from flu, which peaks in the United States between October and March. The flu is spreading quickly this season, with 25 states already reporting cases, the CDC said."We are seeing a big uptick in disease in the past couple of weeks. The virus is all around the United States right now," said Dr. Joe Bresee, chief of Epidemiology and Prevention in the CDC's Influenza Division.In 2009-2010, the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, spread from Central Mexico to 74 other countries, killing an estimated 284,000 people, according to the CDC.While younger people were more susceptible to H1N1 in 2009, Bresee said it is too early to tell whether the same will be true this year.This season's virus has killed six children in the United States, according to CDC data. The agency does not track adult deaths, but dozens have been reported around the country.

On December 6th the US Department of Health and Human Services put a solicitation notice on
the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website for 14 million 65 mg
doses of Potassium Iodide, the standard treatment protocol for someone
exposed to high levels of radiation. As a stipulation of this
solicitation, which gets bid on by registered contractors, the HHS
requires the 14 million doses to be delivered by the end of January. In
other words, the HHS needs enough doses of Potassium Iodide to treat 14
million Americans by the end of January!

The Devil is in the details

The primary use for Potassium Iodide is used for treating, as well as
minimizing damaging effects from, radiation poisoning. The area of the
human body that are most-sensitive to radiation exposure are the thyroid
gland. It absorbs the radiation like a wet sponge.
Potassium Iodide is a salt-stable form of Iodine that isn’t
radioactive, but will still be absorbed by the thyroid